Monthly Archives: February 2011

(Editor’s Note: I have written lots of articles about the Texas Nationalist Movement. The most recent is HERE. The TNM is the premier secessionist organization on the North American continent. No other organization even comes close to their professionalism, focus, energy and RESULTS. In my opinion, only Texas has a chance to gain independence and nationhood in the foreseeable future.

The BIG rally is March 5th in Austin. If you can be there, be there on March 5th. That’s this coming Saturday, friends.)

March 5, 2011 is the 175th anniversary of William Barret Travis drawing the line in the sand at the Alamo. On this day, Texans will draw another line in the sand for the Texas Legislature.

Article 1 Section 1 of the Texas Constitution reads:

“Texas is a free and independent State, subject only to the Constitution of the United States, and the maintenance of our free institutions and the perpetuity of the Union depend upon the pres…ervation of the right of local self-government, unimpaired to all the States.”

Article 1 Section 2 of the Texas Constitution reads:

“All political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority, and instituted for their benefit. The faith of the people of Texas stands pledged to the preservation of a republican form of government, and, subject to this limitation only, they have at all times the inalienable right to alter, reform or abolish their government in such manner as they may think expedient.”

The Texas Legislature has allowed other states to take the lead on issues of state sovereignty and independence. It is time that we gather together and send them a message that a line in the sand has been drawn.

Whether you are a Tea Partier, Tenther or anyone else who believes in these key principles from the Texas Bill of Rights, you need to be there to send that message with us.

The cutoff for filing new bills is March 11th. This could be our last chance to move the Legislature to action in this session. Let’s show them that the freedom and independence of Texas is more important than slot machines and iffy committee assignments.

To quote Col. William Barret Travis: “I shall have to fight the enemy on his own terms, yet I am ready to do it, and if my countrymen do not rally to my relief, I am determined to perish in the defense of this place, and my bones shall reproach my country for her neglect.”

Give his sacrifice meaning. Join us at the Capitol on March 5th.

For more information email mdd@texasnationalist.com or call 800-662-1836.

Here is the final schedule and details for the Line In The Sand Rally in Austin on the 5th of March. You will notice that the parade attendance for early Saturday morning has been cancelled as many of our members and participants will be traveling. The Texas Nationalist Movement has decided to focus all our efforts on the rally and activities after the rally.

Our goal is to get the attention of the Governor and the legislators by our numbers in attendance so that they will file the bill on a referendum vote by the people of Texas on Texas Independence. To accomplish that we must get the actual bill into the hands of as many legislators as possible on that day.

Setup for speakers and music —— 12:00 NOON

Start of official rally —— 1:00PM SOUTH STEPS OF THE CAPITOL

End of rally —– 4:00PM

Toward the end of the rally the TNM will be passing out copies of the bill for the referendum vote. We are asking everyone to take one and bring it personally into the Capitol en masse and make sure that every Representative, Senator, and the Governor get a copy. If we go in as a group, they cannot ignore us.

We are asking everyone to carry your favorite Texas flag. Carry your favorite sign about Texas Independence. Wear your “blue” TNM shirt. Be loud, be proud, be demanding, and know that we are the only option left to save a true Republic.

In conclusion, we are asking everyone to get on Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, personal mail, phone, fax and face-to-face with family and friends. As you watch what is going on in the world and in the United States, you can see that it is imperative for us to gather in large numbers on the 5th. We cannot fail ourselves or Texas. We will make a difference! BE THERE!

Goyim Questions

And Jewish Answers

Ellison Lodge’s attempt to bring order to the debate about Jewish nationalism and influence in America was very laudable and plausible. His categories have the appearance of fairness and balance, which is an achievement in an area that generates so much “heat” and miasma. His four categories also have a pleasing symmetry and simplicity that almost reminded me of Newton’s laws of planetary motion. However, after a few days rolling them around in various portions of my rather convoluted and un-geometrical mind, I couldn’t help thinking that they made the classic Western (or White) intellectual error of equivalence, which is treating things as if they all exist on the same plane.

This sort of thinking, rather like Newtonian physics, has the appearance of rationality, extension, and universal applicability, and, more than this, just like Newtonian physics, it almost always works. For example, there is certainly equivalence between German and French national rights and interests. Although these might have been addressed at various times by different methods—politics, economics, and war—the idea that both countries had roughly equal national rights and weight has always informed their history and their relationship.

When France was dominant at the time of Napoleon’s ascendancy, the idea of a German national interest mobilized things beneath the surface and prepared the way for his downfall. Likewise, when France was crushed by the superior military genius of the Germans in 1870 and 1940, the idea that France was somehow still equal to Germany kept the national flame burning strongly. This idea of a just equivalence of national interests between all the European nations has led at various times to wars and more recently to the unfortunate situation where the nations have agreed—based on the idea of a kind of negative equivalence—to temporarily subsume their legitimate national interests in the bureaucratic swamp of the European Superstate.

In the intellectual culture of the West, which has basically been shaped by Christian universalist notions, equivalence seems both logical and moral, but the case of Jewish nationalism actually serves to show the flaws in the system. Just as Newtonian physics breaks down where the space/time fabric seems to be bent and distorted by Black Holes and Dark Matter, so the idea of equivalence becomes an increasing absurdity when applied to the issue of Jewish nationalism.

This is essentially because the Jews have not existed as a nation (people + land), but merely as a people, since the fall of Masada in the year 73. To continue existing as a separate people, the Jews have been forced to adopt policies that are the very antithesis of equivalence. Indeed, any attempt at “equivalence” in the Dark Age or Medieval periods, or before the so-called European Enlightenment, when legal restrictions against Jews started to be removed, would surely have seen the Jewish people wiped out.

In essence, the Jews survived by existing on a different plane and in a different dimension from other peoples, their only equivalents being minor ones like the Romany or Parsees. In Newtonian terms, they retreated from the clear, straight spaces of upstanding national assertion into the Dark Matter of ghettoes and the Black Holes of behind-the-scenes influence.

Although the world has clearly changed a lot since the so-called Enlightenment, the example of the Nazis, Stalin’s intended pogrom before his death, the rabid hatred of Jews in the Islamic world, and the smouldering distrust of Jews in the Orient, should remind us that the more things change the more they stay the same. Anti-Semitism may have been in abeyance in the West, especially in America, where it seems to be mitigated by Judeophilic versions of Christianity, and Jews may have attained the undue cultural and political influence in that country that is needed to support their guilt-bought state of Israel.

But how stable is this really?

American power is on the wane, the guilt-bought state is now morally over-mortgaged, and old notions of the Jew as a parasite and manipulator seem set to make a comeback—even in America, as the economy slides and the culture becomes less Anglo. The fact is, any idea of an equivalence for Jewish nationalism is purely based on extreme and temporary factors. Unlike my nation, Scotland, and a host of others, which won their right to exist through incredible moral and physical courage, the Jews lost their battles and chose instead to exist in a shadow world until the artificial creation of the Neo-Jewish state attempted to thrust their national interests onto the same plane as others; and while that state has so far vindicated itself militarily, how much of this is due to “special assistance”?

Let us consider Jewish interests through Lodge’s four categories in the light of the full historical and likely future picture.

Pro-ethno-politics for Israel + Anti-ethno-politics for Europeans and the West

Anti-ethno-politics for Israel + Anti-ethno-politics for Europeans and the West

Pro-ethno-politics for Israel + Pro-ethno-politics for Europeans and the West

Anti-ethno-politics for Israel + Pro-ethno-politics for Europeans and the West

Option 1 is short-termist and, as Lodge rightly points out, and is blatantly intellectually inconsistent in our dominant intellectual culture. This view will only lead to growing hatred of the Jews and a final repudiation and isolation of the Israeli state.

Option 2 is generally acceptable in the same way that most European nations “accept” the European superstate, but this also reveals the essential artificiality of the Israeli state. While the European nations can pristinely survive a few decades of bureaucratic standardization, Israel, situated where it is, can’t survive without rabid ethno-politics.

Option 3 sounds good, but with America pursuing its own interests and cozying up to the far more numerous and economically important Arab world, Israel will have to go it alone; estimated time of survival 20 to 30 years.

In short, none of the first three options work for the Jews, which leaves the fourth option—anti-ethno-politics for Israel plus pro-ethno-politics for Europeans and the West. Lodge calls this intellectually inconsistent, and it is—but only based on the premise of the equivalence of Jewish nationalism. It is at this point that the flaws of equivalence and “intellectual consistency” become most apparent, because option four is actually the best option for the Jewish people as it reflects the conditions that have allowed them to survive as a people, although not a nation, for nearly 2000 years.

By throwing away their Zionism, by remembering that their nation was totally crushed, and by accepting the historical fact that they have always subsisted by existing on a different level from other peoples, the Jews will ensure their survival as a people for another 2000 year. The alternatives will crush them as a people as surely as the Roman legions at Masada crushed any hope of a Jewish state.

Modern Freedom means the Limitless Freedom to Will. Unleashed from the Guiding Hand of Christianity and Tradition, the Freedom to Will can Mean the Freedom to Will Terror

Christianity Has Made Us – So How Can We Imagine a Non-Christian World?

It is difficult for us, living as we are at the end of nearly two millennia of Christian Civilisation, fully to grasp quite how revolutionary Christianity was in the transformation of attitudes in the ancient world, or to imagine what it might mean if those attitudes were to disappear, as disappearing they are in the West.

The World of Rome and the Christian Revolution

In his book ‘Atheist Delusions; The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies’ the theologian David Bentley Hart does a terrific job of bringing out the impact of Christianity on the ancients, transforming a world in which an individual’s worth was predicated on his or her power or lack of it to one in which every individual has intrinsic worth. Roman society was built on a rather Nietzschean hierarchy of power in which the most powerful of all, the Roman Emperor, could be worshipped as a god while the lower orders were of little account individually and slaves had no personhood whatsoever. The latter were powerless things, like Christ before the powerful Roman Procurator Pontius Pilate.

Hart says , ‘the new world we see being brought into being in the Gospels is one in which the whole grand cosmic architecture of prerogative , power and eminence has been shaken and superseded by a new positively anarchic order; an order in which we see the glory of God revealed in a crucified slave’.

Hart’s Answer to Christopher Hitchens and his Ilk: Western Civilisation

The title of Christopher Hitchens’ book ‘God is not Great’ is subtitled ‘How Religion Poisons Everything. ’ After a remarkably entertaining exposure, touched with more than a soupcon of asperity, of the paucity of Hitchen’s intellectual capabilities (and those of Dawkins), Hart asks, ‘Does he (Hitchens) really mean precisely everything?”

Would that apply then – confining ourselves just to things Christian – to ancient and medieval hospitals, leper asylums, orphanages, almshouses and hostels? To the golden rule, ‘Love thine enemies’? ‘Judge not lest ye be judged’? Prophetic admonitions against oppressing the poor, and commands to feed and clothe and comfort those in need? To the music of Palestrina and Bach, Michelangleo’s Pieta, ‘ah bright wings’; San Marco’s mosaics, the Bible of Amiens and all the gorgeous blue stained glass at Chartres? To the abolitionist movement and contemporary efforts to liberate Sudanese slaves? And so on and so on? Surely it cannot be the case that if only purged of faith these things would be even better than they are; were it not for faith it seems fairly obvious, most of them would have no existence at all.’

Our Future: the Idea of the Sunny Uplands of ‘Progress’ is Likely to Lead to a Totalitarian Hell.

Hart holds out little hope for the West in the dawning age of secularism. He asks, ‘What evidence is there for the idea that secular reason, if finally allowed to move forward free of the constraining hand of archaic faith will naturally make society more free, more humane and more rational than it has been? It is rather difficult… to vest a great deal of hope in modernity, however radiantly enchanting its promises, when one considers how many innocent lives (‘an unprecedentedly vast collection of corpses’) have already been swallowed up in the flames of ‘Progress.’ The best ideals to which we moderns continue to cling long antedate modernity. For the most part all we can claim as truly, distinctively our own are our atrocities… The process of secularisation was marked from the first by the magnificent limitlessness of its violence.’

Radical Individualism and the Triumph of the Will

The tale of the modern nation-state’s struggle for liberation from the ‘shackles’ of religion and tradition should be located within the larger narrative of the triumph of the will.

Like most of the defining ideas in our culture, perverted though they may have been in the modern era, the emphasis on freedom of the will has its origins in Christian theology, but Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, spoke both as the heir of the late Scholastic tradition and for modernity when he said that the true image of god within human beings is the godlike liberty and incomprehensibility of the will.

Modern Ideas of Freedom are Nihilistic

Hart argues that the modern notion of freedom is essentially nihilistic, ie freedom is to be found in the individual subject’s power of choice, rather than in what is actually chosen. Neither God nor nature nor reason provides the measure of an act’s true liberty, for an act is free only when it is done in defiance of all three.

The Degradation of the Idea of Liberty. Freedom as Consumerism

Where is the ascendancy of the modern Idea of Freedom as Pure Spontaneity of the Will leading our Culture, Hart asks? At an ordinary, everyday level, it obviously leads to a degradation of the very idea of freedom, its reduction in the public imagination to a fairly banal kind of liberty, no more –though no less- significant than a consumer’s freedom to choose among different kinds of breads, shoes, televisions, drugs, drinks, sexual activities and relationships, political parties or religions.

The Death of Shared Obligations and Common Cause – the Decay of ‘Community ‘ (and therefore National Sentiment)

At the level of conventional social behaviours it leads perhaps towards a decay of a shared sense of social obligation or common cause, or towards an increasingly insipid and self-absorbed private culture, or towards a tendency in society at large less to judge the laudability of particular choices by reference to the worthiness of their objects than to judge objects worthy solely because they have been chosen. (eg ’a woman’s right to choose’)

From the Banal to the Terrible

All this is both obvious and rather vague, but the modern concept of Freedom can lead to other more terrible things as well. For what the will may will, when it is subordinate only to its own native exuberance, is practically without limit.
Although pure spontaneity of the will is an illusion (we must actually will something), something dangerously novel entered our culture when we began to believe that the proper end of the will might simply to be willing as such. Nor does the truly liberated have to confine itself to the adventure of discovering and inventing itself. Collective will is so much more exciting than an individual’s will, at least if it can be disciplined and marshalled for some collective purpose.

With no Transcendent Source of the Good, the Capacity for Evil is Limitless

Furthermore if there is no transcendent source of the good to which the will is drawn but only the power of the will to decide what ends it desires, then no human project can be said to be inherently irrational or abominable. If freedom of the will is our supreme value, after all, then it is to all intents and purposes our god.

Modern Freedom means the Limitless Freedom to Will. Unleashed from the Guiding Hand of Christianity and Tradition, the Freedom to Will can Mean the Freedom to Will Terror

Christianity Has Made Us – So How Can We Imagine a Non-Christian World?

It is difficult for us, living as we are at the end of nearly two millennia of Christian Civilisation, fully to grasp quite how revolutionary Christianity was in the transformation of attitudes in the ancient world, or to imagine what it might mean if those attitudes were to disappear, as disappearing they are in the West.

The World of Rome and the Christian Revolution

In his book ‘Atheist Delusions; The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies’ the theologian David Bentley Hart does a terrific job of bringing out the impact of Christianity on the ancients, transforming a world in which an individual’s worth was predicated on his or her power or lack of it to one in which every individual has intrinsic worth. Roman society was built on a rather Nietzschean hierarchy of power in which the most powerful of all, the Roman Emperor, could be worshipped as a god while the lower orders were of little account individually and slaves had no personhood whatsoever. The latter were powerless things, like Christ before the powerful Roman Procurator Pontius Pilate.

Hart says , ‘the new world we see being brought into being in the Gospels is one in which the whole grand cosmic architecture of prerogative , power and eminence has been shaken and superseded by a new positively anarchic order; an order in which we see the glory of God revealed in a crucified slave’.

Hart’s Answer to Christopher Hitchens and his Ilk: Western Civilisation

The title of Christopher Hitchens’ book ‘God is not Great’ is subtitled ‘How Religion Poisons Everything. ’ After a remarkably entertaining exposure, touched with more than a soupcon of asperity, of the paucity of Hitchen’s intellectual capabilities (and those of Dawkins), Hart asks, ‘Does he (Hitchens) really mean precisely everything?”

Would that apply then – confining ourselves just to things Christian – to ancient and medieval hospitals, leper asylums, orphanages, almshouses and hostels? To the golden rule, ‘Love thine enemies’? ‘Judge not lest ye be judged’? Prophetic admonitions against oppressing the poor, and commands to feed and clothe and comfort those in need? To the music of Palestrina and Bach, Michelangleo’s Pieta, ‘ah bright wings’; San Marco’s mosaics, the Bible of Amiens and all the gorgeous blue stained glass at Chartres? To the abolitionist movement and contemporary efforts to liberate Sudanese slaves? And so on and so on? Surely it cannot be the case that if only purged of faith these things would be even better than they are; were it not for faith it seems fairly obvious, most of them would have no existence at all.’

Our Future: the Idea of the Sunny Uplands of ‘Progress’ is Likely to Lead to a Totalitarian Hell.

Hart holds out little hope for the West in the dawning age of secularism. He asks, ‘What evidence is there for the idea that secular reason, if finally allowed to move forward free of the constraining hand of archaic faith will naturally make society more free, more humane and more rational than it has been? It is rather difficult… to vest a great deal of hope in modernity, however radiantly enchanting its promises, when one considers how many innocent lives (‘an unprecedentedly vast collection of corpses’) have already been swallowed up in the flames of ‘Progress.’ The best ideals to which we moderns continue to cling long antedate modernity. For the most part all we can claim as truly, distinctively our own are our atrocities… The process of secularisation was marked from the first by the magnificent limitlessness of its violence.’

Radical Individualism and the Triumph of the Will

The tale of the modern nation-state’s struggle for liberation from the ‘shackles’ of religion and tradition should be located within the larger narrative of the triumph of the will.

Like most of the defining ideas in our culture, perverted though they may have been in the modern era, the emphasis on freedom of the will has its origins in Christian theology, but Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, spoke both as the heir of the late Scholastic tradition and for modernity when he said that the true image of god within human beings is the godlike liberty and incomprehensibility of the will.

Modern Ideas of Freedom are Nihilistic

Hart argues that the modern notion of freedom is essentially nihilistic, ie freedom is to be found in the individual subject’s power of choice, rather than in what is actually chosen. Neither God nor nature nor reason provides the measure of an act’s true liberty, for an act is free only when it is done in defiance of all three.

The Degradation of the Idea of Liberty. Freedom as Consumerism

Where is the ascendancy of the modern Idea of Freedom as Pure Spontaneity of the Will leading our Culture, Hart asks? At an ordinary, everyday level, it obviously leads to a degradation of the very idea of freedom, its reduction in the public imagination to a fairly banal kind of liberty, no more –though no less- significant than a consumer’s freedom to choose among different kinds of breads, shoes, televisions, drugs, drinks, sexual activities and relationships, political parties or religions.

The Death of Shared Obligations and Common Cause – the Decay of ‘Community ‘ (and therefore National Sentiment)

At the level of conventional social behaviours it leads perhaps towards a decay of a shared sense of social obligation or common cause, or towards an increasingly insipid and self-absorbed private culture, or towards a tendency in society at large less to judge the laudability of particular choices by reference to the worthiness of their objects than to judge objects worthy solely because they have been chosen. (eg ’a woman’s right to choose’)

From the Banal to the Terrible

All this is both obvious and rather vague, but the modern concept of Freedom can lead to other more terrible things as well. For what the will may will, when it is subordinate only to its own native exuberance, is practically without limit.
Although pure spontaneity of the will is an illusion (we must actually will something), something dangerously novel entered our culture when we began to believe that the proper end of the will might simply to be willing as such. Nor does the truly liberated have to confine itself to the adventure of discovering and inventing itself. Collective will is so much more exciting than an individual’s will, at least if it can be disciplined and marshalled for some collective purpose.

With no Transcendent Source of the Good, the Capacity for Evil is Limitless

Furthermore if there is no transcendent source of the good to which the will is drawn but only the power of the will to decide what ends it desires, then no human project can be said to be inherently irrational or abominable. If freedom of the will is our supreme value, after all, then it is to all intents and purposes our god.

‘As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator … will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope, the movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.’ Aldous Huxley: ‘Introduction to ‘Brave New World’.

In Part One, we saw how the Triumph of the Will, increasingly unconstrained by religion and tradition, leads to a ‘society’ – our society, if society it can be called – which instils deep prejudices in favour of the self and the ego and its freedom to Will.

In this nihilising, individualising world, there is a diminishing sense of ultimate purpose. Meaning is evaporating leaving a residue consisting of what is immediately self-indulgent and the practicalities of achieving self-indulgence in food, sex, relationships, social status (power) – in anything and everything. Life is thought of as merely an extended version of a trawl round the shops, the ‘existential supermarket’ from which lifestyles can be selected like soap powders and without much deeper or more meaningful consequences. Such trends as the destruction of the character of the country through mass immigration and cultural relativism are of subsidiary or little concern.

The Triumph of the Will can lead to State Terror

We saw how in the Triumph of the Will, because the freedom to Will takes absolute precedence over any of what many think of as moral considerations (the example was given of ‘a woman’s right to choose’ to have an abortion) could lead to terror of the kind practiced in the last century by tyrants such as Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Mao as well as to more beneficent scenarios. (If one is a pessimist about human nature and believes in the existence of the human capacity for evil or Original Sin, as Christians call it, for which the existence of the aforementioned individuals and their regimes is surely ample proof, one is likely to believe that the eventual outcome is probably the evil one). But what is the mechanism by which individuals’ freedom to Will is translated into State Oppression and thus opens the way to state terror?

The Great Irony: How Radical Individualism Leads to State Control

David Bentley Hart does not go into this but the writer Theodore Dalrymple sets out the means very succinctly in his book ‘In Praise of Prejudice’:-

‘What starts out as search for increased if not total individualism ends up by increasing the power of governments over individuals. It does not do so by the totalitarian method of rendering compulsory all that is not forbidden – a process that in all human history has gone farthest, perhaps, in North Korea – but in destroying all moral authority that intervenes between individual human will and governmental power. Everything that is not forbidden by law is, ipso facto, permissible. ‘There is no law against it’ becomes an unanswerable justification for conduct that is selfish and egotistical.

The Politicians and Judges become the Moral Arbiters

Thus it is the law, and those who make it and who administer it who are the moral arbiters of society. It is they who decide what is permissible and what is not. And so all stigmas are removed from conduct that is too expressly and actively forbidden by religious belief and by custom and we are asked to acquiesce in Political Correctness.

Politicians and Judges become Gods, at least in their own Eyes

But that is not the end of it. Human Nature being what it is, the law givers (think that lying egomaniac Tony Blair, the insanely arrogant and incompetent Gordon Brown, the evil bully and liar Alistair Campbell and the harridan, half-mad obsessive Harriet Harman), and the judges to whom is delegated the task of deciding what constitutes good and bad behaviour and attitudes, enjoy their power. They actually come to believe that they deserve it. Because there is no other source of effective collective authority, such as the Church, they believe that they have been chosen for their task because they possess rare qualities of insight into how people should live their lives. And since their power it is infinite and they think themselves infinitely responsible for the welfare of the people, they come to regard themselves as infinitely good. They become god-like in their own eyes at least.

The Drug of Power and Creeping Centralised Authority

Radical Individualism – the Freedom of the Will – is thus not just compatible with the radical centralisation of authority but is a product of it. The individual is free to get on with his life as his whim dictates, but, however, within increasingly narrow limits. The ability to wield prescriptive power is one of the most powerful of drugs. Since there is no buffering, intervening power between the individual and the state, the power of the governing elites is free and they have the motive to insinuate it into every nook and cranny of an individual’s life. So decision –making in life is divided into two spheres: the one being about the serious business which is left to the sovereign power of the state, the other the increasingly narrow sphere of private affairs.

The State’s Attack on the Institutions which limit its Power

The State, meaning the horrible creatures who have managed to insinuate themselves into political office, (You have to be very odd to have a driving ambition to order others around in the way our present Politicians do), citing the drive to the untrammelled Freedom of the Will of Radical Individualism in the context of secularised nihilism, launched an attack on all the intervening authorities which stood in the way of its power to control our lives such as the family, the church and to a lesser extent the professional organisations. All organisations such as these, (and this applies to some Political Parties also) have in any case been melting away as secularism drains meaning and purpose and radical Individualism destroys collectivity. In the absence of their mediating influence, we have become accustomed to expect and to accept the central direction of our lives.

What is the Future for Our Country?

What is the future for our country in the light of these trends? Can it survive its nihilism and creeping Fascism ? Heidegger, who held out little hope for Western Civilisation is the subject of the next edition of ‘Prophets of Doom’.

How the Government Controls, Ruins Our Lives

It was just last June in this space that I reviewed Nullification, by Thomas Woods. It showed how, over the course of American history, states and citizens successfully thwarted federal usurpations of power. It since has become a guidebook used in many state capitols.

He details how, as he puts it, “the federal government has, in fact, been an enemy of the people’s welfare, and that the progress in our living standards has occurred in spite of its efforts. [The government] pits individuals, firms, industries, regions, races and age groups against each other in a zero-sum game of mutual plunder. It takes credit for improvements in material conditions that we, in fact, owe to the private sector, while refusing to accept responsibility for the countless failures and social ills to which its own programs have given rise.”

That’s the most accurate description of the federal government that I’ve ever read.

He describes an economic and social “crash” that is inevitable: By 2020, according to the Congressional Budget Office, interest payments on the national debt will be $925 billion a year – assuming the economy recovers, which it might not.

Future liabilities for Medicare are $96.5 trillion. Of that, $19.4 trillion comes from Medicare Part D, the prescription drug program imposed by President George W. Bush, whom some still call a “conservative.”

The debt the federal government has run up in our name is $200 trillion, according to Boston University economist Lawrence Kotlikoff, who thinks some relatively painless reforms could improve matters. “The truth is, there are no such reforms,” counters Woods. “If there were, they would have been implemented long ago.” That $200 trillion comes down to $64,516 owed by every American, even babies born today.

Woods also shows how the massive military spending of recent decades has debilitated the economy by diverting scarce production from consumer goods, much as happened to the old Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War in 1989 saw a small decline in defense spending. But that was reversed after 9/11. He details how the machine-tool industry’s heavy reliance on Pentagon contracts severely retarded its ability to innovate in producing advanced machines, allowing first the Europeans, then the Japanese to dominate that sector. Woods warns that “the more an industry caters to the Pentagon, the less it makes production with the civilian economy in mind.”

I think Woods is right in predicting that the out-of-control federal government is driving the country off a cliff. He acknowledges that reform will be difficult, but puts forth a few ideas which, if combined and acted upon, could prevent disaster. Some of them: Allow people to opt out of the Social Security and Medicare schemes, which are going broke. Instead of haggling over cutting every item in a budget, just cut everything across-the-board by as high a percentage as possible.

The decline of the dollar by the Federal Reserve Board – detailed in this book – should be checked by allowing Americans to use any currency they wish for their transactions; or use gold, silver or some other commodity. Promote state nullification of repressive federal laws. Pass a constitutional amendment allowing any federal law to be repealed by a two-thirds vote of the states. That’s a start. He has many more suggestions.

There is a reason I met the union thugs on the steps of the State Capitol in Denver the other day. There is a reason I have been engaged in this struggle since the beginning. It is not because I like to protest, far from it. I don’t like to put myself out there in the streets, it is unseemly. But, I also recognize that I have a personal responsibility to take action where that action is obviously needed. To expect someone else to tend to my liberty, or my rights is as unseemly as anything I could do, moreso than protesting.

The situation is clear: we either fight for our liberty, or we lose it. We stand up for fiscal responsibility or we might as well just toss our credit cards to the looters and moochers. Why protect our identity from thieves if we are going to invite the thieves in to write the laws?

Here’s the difference between private sector unions and public sector unions, since that seems to be an intellectual stumbling block for most defenders of the debacle in Wisconsin. When a private sector union delegation sits down with a corporation, it is dealing with the owners of the company: the CEO, the CFO, or the COO, all of whom own stock, all of whom have a stake in the success of the company. They cannot arbitrarily increase the price of their stock to cover an increase in wages and benefits. They can increase the cost of their goods, but that puts them at a disadvantage in the marketplace and starts a downward spiral leading to the loss of all jobs and all pensions. They can sacrifice some profits for the agreement, but once those profits are gone the company will have to take on debt to open new plants, or start new lines of goods. It all comes out of the bottom line.

When a public sector union sits down with the staff of a governor, or mayor, there is no genuine conflict. On one hand you have an organization who in many respects has helped to get the governor or mayor elected, or could pose significant opposition to the governor or mayor in future elections. The governor or mayor has many more reasons to facilitate the union rather than incur its wrath. The governor is not going to have his 401k devalued by his decision. He is not going to be personally liable for the wages he agrees to increase, he merely passes a bill that increases taxes and since the people, the rightful voice in this conflict, have not been in on the negotiation, they are unaware that the taxes being raised are to cover the agreement recently made.

Historically speaking, public sector unions have been around for a very short time and already they have led to the fiscal instability of every state in which they have taken root. This is because they have abnormal influence on their bosses who do not own the institution they are representing. Only the people can represent their interests in this negotiation and the only way to do that, as yet, is to protest, to throw a fit, to get in their face, to stand up to their aggression, to confront them directly, to gather and demand a voice.

Let me quote Rousseau:

“As soon as public service ceases to be the principle concern of the Citizens, and they prefer to serve with their purses instead of their persons, the State is already nearly in ruin. Is it necessary to go to combat? They pay for troops and remain at home; is it necessary to go to the Council? They name deputies and remain at home. By dint of laziness and money, they finally have soldiers to enslave the fatherland and representatives to sell it.”

How would you turn normal human beings into murderous and hateful psychopaths who blindly obey their totalitarian systems and its authorities, suppressing and killing innocent people? In short: How would you create a terrorist?

Violent and murderous political, ethnic, and religious regimes have used the same effective methods all over the world throughout history. The procedure consists of two simple steps that are repeated again and again:

1.

You force a person to repeat the system’s doctrine over and over for months and years until he knows every word by heart and it pervades his or her whole way of thinking and it is the only truth he believes in.

2.

You beat and scare the person (best if done randomly and severely), thus forcing him to become insensitive and unempathic in order to be able to bear the physical and psychological suffering and to increase his feelings of anger, frustration, and fear — feelings that are then directed against the system’s enemies.

In this way you will create a person whose whole being is pervaded by the system’s doctrine and who has lost the ability to feel both his own and others’ pain. You will have an emotionally cold person who blindly follows his leaders and their political or religious doctrine. If you use this method on a child who is in the process of developing his personality, the learned doctrine will simply become a part of the child’s personality. The psychological impact of the physical abuse will also be deeper. As children and youth are dependent on adults for acceptance, they are easier to influence.

Being a child psychologist, I was shocked to realise that this is exactly what is done to millions of Muslim children in both the Muslim world and the West. Tens of thousand of madrassas and Quranic schools all over the world are making their students repeat the Quran and the Hadiths again and again, until they know them by heart. They are told to believe every word and never to question either the way or the goal.

It is normal in these schools that the defenceless and innocent children are randomly beaten and humiliated by the teachers and older students — who themselves are emotionally destroyed beings who have been abused in the same way that they now use against their pupils. They personify the goal: The abused becomes the abuser.